Island Universe Story is an infinite series of music produced by Helado Negro. These EP’s will serve as a sub-narrative behind the showcased broadcast of the full-length release schedule. Yet, this sub-narrative is the subconscious whisperings, deep labyrinth of dot-connecting and cartography for the diligent listeners into the inner-workings. The IUS series will inform one another, actively communicating to collectively create new meanings in Helado Negro’s music.

One, the first in this series, is the result of experimentation with a Scully 280 1/4″ tape machine, and by creating tape loops and tape edits from the Teenage Engineering OP-1. These catalytic tools were provided deep dredging and strip-mining for the brain trust at Helado Negro Central Headquarters.

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

The above is a desperate and forlorn quote from Aldous Huxley. With the Island Universe Story series, Helado Negro has set out to chart new constellations and family lineage for the lonely souls and stars of the deep universe of existence.

Visual representation of IUSOne is manifested by Kristi Sword and NRMAL. Kristi Sword’s approach was tactile and maleable, taking different colors of Play-Doh and fusing them together, then pushing them through a drain screen to produce cloth-like tendrils. NRMAL then provided the font treatment and layout.